Funding deal blocks ICE from arresting adults taking in...

1of5FILE - In this Dec. 11, 2018 file photo, an asylum-seeking boy from Central America runs down a hallway after arriving from an immigration detention center to a shelter in San Diego. The Trump administration says it would require extraordinary effort to reunite what may be thousands of migrant children who were separated from their parents and, even if it could, the children would likely be emotionally harmed. An official says removing children from "sponsor" homes to rejoin their parents "could be traumatic." (AP Photo/Gregory Bull, File)Photo: Gregory Bull, Associated Press

2of5Shoes and a teddy bear, brought by a group of U.S. mayors, are piled up outside a holding facility for immigrant children in Tornillo, Texas, near the Mexican border.Photo: Andres Leighton / Associated Press 2018

3of5People who have been taken into custody related to cases of illegal entry into the United States sit in cages at a facility in McAllen, Texas, in 2018.Photo: U.S. Customs and Border Protection 2018

4of5An immigrant boy plays soccer as others gather and watch at the Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children site in Homestead, Fla., in 2018.Photo: Brynn Anderson / Associated Press 2018

5of5A child watches as a U.S. Border Patrol agent searches a fellow Central American immigrant after they crossed the border from Mexico in El Paso, Texas. The migrants had turned themselves in, seeking political asylum in the United States.Photo: John Moore / Getty Images

WASHINGTON — A government funding deal that passed Congress late Thursday would block federal officers from arresting undocumented immigrants solely because they come forward to take in migrant children.

The constraint on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency comes after The Chronicle reported that the government had made scores of such arrests — including more than 100 people who were taken into custody from July through November despite having no criminal record. Immigrant and child welfare advocates had assailed the practice as endangering young people by keeping them in detention longer and by giving immigrants an incentive to conceal potential sponsors’ true identities.

The population of undocumented children in government custody skyrocketed to record levels as immigration officials investigated the potential sponsors.

The ban on arresting sponsors with no criminal record is included in a bill to fund roughly one-quarter of the government through September. The appropriations legislation is the product of weeks of intense negotiations to avert a repeat of the partial shutdown that began Dec. 22 and lasted 35 days.

The Senate and House both passed the bill Thursday, and the White House said President Trump would sign it.

House Democrats pushed strongly for the provision during negotiations over the funding package, said a Democratic aide who was not authorized to speak publicly about the talks. Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz offered the specific legislative language.

At issue is the process of finding homes for undocumented immigrant children who come to the U.S. by themselves or are separated from an adult at the border.

Those children end up detained in a national network of shelters until they can be released to an adult, usually a relative. The shelters are designed to be a temporary bridge for often-traumatized children to more stable homes, in which they can pursue their case to stay in the country legally.

To sponsor a child, adults have long had to go through background checks for any criminal history or other red flags that might endanger the child. Immigration status is not weighed as a risk factor.

But last year the Trump administration added additional layers of review, including working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to run fingerprints of potential sponsors. That caused concern within the immigrant community that sponsors, many of whom are undocumented themselves, could be ensnared in the administration’s no-limits immigration enforcement. The revelation that ICE had in turn used that information to arrest potential sponsors, most of whom had no criminal record, confirmed that fear.

Under the administration’s policies, the number of children in custody reached nearly 15,000, breaking records even after the government halted the practice it implemented last spring of separating families at the border. In December, the Department of Health and Human Services stopped requiring that every additional adult in a sponsor’s home be fingerprinted, a practice that had greatly slowed the process, keeping children detained longer. Since then, the number of children in custody has dropped to 11,500.

The government funding bill bars the administration from detaining or moving to deport undocumented immigrants based solely on information provided by Health and Human Services, which runs the unaccompanied children program, unless it provides evidence of a past child abuse-related felony or potential human trafficking.

Tal Kopan is the Washington Correspondent for The San Francisco Chronicle. Previously, she was a political reporter for CNN Politics, where she covered immigration, cybersecurity and other hot-button issues in Washington, including the 2016 presidential election.

Prior to joining the network, Kopan was a reporter for POLITICO in Washington, D.C., where she reported for their breaking news team and policy verticals. While covering policy, she was a reporter for POLITICO Pro Cybersecurity, where she covered cybersecurity policymaking on Capitol Hill and followed cyber-related issues in the Justice Department such as cybercrime.

Kopan also previously worked as a Web producer at Fox Chicago News and as a freelance Web producer at ABC 7 Chicago, where she spent time covering stories such as the trials of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and the election of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

Kopan was selected as a 2014-2015 National Press Foundation Paul Miller Fellow and a member of the 2015 class of Journalist Law School at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles. She was also the recipient of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, Midwest Chapter's Ephraim Family Scholarship.

Kopan graduated with honors from the University of Chicago with a bachelor's in law, letters and society.